[kirklancaster]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

Yes. I know it sounds like trumpet-blowing, but as a massive underachiever (top school grades, top University offers, MOST of a degree ) I can say quite confidently that most of the supervisory / area manager level staff are... To be blunt... Uneducated and unintelligent.

Worse still is that I've worked alongside plenty of very bright staff and watched them be passed over time and time again (the ones who are really trying, I'd be lying if I said I'm in that boat ) because, for those roles, they don't want clever and imaginative people with ideas for working independently. They want jobsworths who will do as they are told. Blindly following whichever insane idea the folks in London (who never set a foot on ground level) have come up with, then they berate us for a while when these plans inevitably fail miserably... Before accepting that it was a bad plan, and coming up with another. Usually it's worse.

Its been getting worse recently, too. A few years ago we had a decent level of autonomy and could do things that WE knew would work... And they often worked very well. The structure of the company then changed and they now want "cookie cutter" conformity across the company. I have no idea why. It's impersonal, and people hate it. We're not even allowed to buy Halloween decorations - they send a little box with a few things and a diagram of exactly where to place them...


I also have a good friend who is very successful in a pensions investment company... Who described our company structure, when I described it to him, as "literally one of the worse he's ever heard".

I KNEW the answers before I asked you the questions, and I recognise all that you are saying as true - even down to the Halloween box example.

The trouble is (and I half suspect Parliament is like this) sooner or later, this kind of accepted 'institutional' banality, wears down the genuine hard-working, honest and conscientious, employees who are loyal and who do have initiative, and they usually end up 'going with the flow' or they leave.

It is no wonder that so many companies hit the wall.

Thanks for replying.